Elizabeth Barrett Browning Research Paper

Browsing Browning’s Life and Works

In the early 1800s, the world was being introduced to a new type of writing that strayed from the scientific ideals of the Enlightenment Era and entered the world of Romance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a highly influential person in this movement. She led a life full of oppression which had an extreme impact on her works. Browning’s life experiences through the adversity that she faced in her adolescence, highly affected her career as a writer as she used her circumstances as inspiration for her works.

Initially, Elizabeth Barrett Browning early years were some of the most taxing overall. She was born in March, 1806 in Durham, England and was the eldest child to her eleven siblings (“Elizabeth Barrett

After the death of her mother, Browning’s tyrannical father forced her younger siblings to be farm hands on the plantation in Jamaica following England’s abolition of slavery (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). In the midst of the chaos that surrounded the plantation and the death of the matriarch of the Barrett family, Browning stayed grounded in her education. She published An Essay on Mind and Other Poems as well as her interpretation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound all before her 25th birthday. Her faith and education stayed at the forefront of her life through all the adversity she faced. In response to her father sending away her siblings, Browning wrote a book of poems while aboard a ship in the Atlantic. Her brother drowned during the year she and him spent on the ship (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Again, Browning faced another loss. With the untimely death of her brother, Browning became highly depressed and for five years stayed in her bedroom. While she was in this highly dark place, Browning continued writing and she soon published “Poems.” This collection of poems is one of Browning most personally significant publishments, due to the attention she received from Robert Browning (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”). Elizabeth’s father forbade any of his children to marry so their relationship was extensively slow, but after almost two years and 574 letters the

This poem was written to her husband, Robert Browning, prior to their elopement. (“Elizabeth Barrett Browning”) Also it is within a culmination of other love poems to her husband in the book Sonnets from the Portuguese. In this poem, Browning begins to try and count the many different ways she loves her beloved. She names almost a dozen examples of her love that range all over (“Sonnet 43”). Her love consumes every ounce of her being. She loves him in her past iniquities and in the present. Finally, in the final stanza Browning declares that she wishes their love to be eternal (“Sonnet 43”). Sonnet 43 is also known as “How Do I Love Thee?” This coloquillial title is derived from the rhetorical question to prose the entirety of the poem. This one question holds provides a basis for what the reader should expect the poem to be centered around. Also it creates some ambiguity because the “thee” spoken about is unnamed throughout. On line 5 and 6, Browning states

“I love thee to the level of every